DANIELSVILLE — Lemuel Penn and his two fellow Army reservists were just passing through Athens in the wee morning hours of July 11, 1964. But, when they stopped to change drivers near the University of Georgia’s arch, they caught the eye of Ku Klux Klansmen.
The white supremacists decided to follow the Black men, who were driving from Fort Benning to Washington, D.C. North of Athens, in pitch-black darkness, the klansmen pulled alongside the Chevrolet that carried Penn and his two friends and fired shots.
Penn, a decorated World War II veteran, died instantly.
Sixty years have passed since that morning. But Thursday, dozens gathered in Madison County, where the shooting occurred, to remember the killing that still haunts some area residents.
Dena Chandler, who is white, was 12 years old when Penn was murdered. When word of the killing began to spread, she said, it was the first time she saw her father, also a military man, cry.
Chandler, who organized Thursday’s event, said she worries that too many people in the area don’t know about the sickening act that took a good man’s life. And some, she said, would rather forget.
“I think there’s guilt and shame and defensiveness,” said Chandler, a longtime Madison County resident.
Credit: Ziyu Julian Zhu/AJC
Credit: Ziyu Julian Zhu/AJC
The remembrance was held at the Madison County Senior Center. Many of the 60 or so people who attended later made a 12-mile drive to the bridge where Penn was gunned down near the small town of Comer. They prayed, sang and dropped flowers into the Broad River.
“In the South, the past is never dead. It’s not even past,” said Chandler, quoting writer William Faulkner.
Penn was a husband, father and assistant public school superintendent in Washington, D.C. He and the two other reservists were in Georgia for training at Fort Benning, now called Fort Moore, in Columbus.
The trio planned to drive through the night to avoid trouble.
But around 3:30 a.m., they stopped so Penn could take over as driver of the ‘59 Chevy. The klansman tailed them northeast into Madison County.
Cecil Myers and Howard Sims sprayed the Chevrolet with shotgun blasts, hitting Penn in the head and neck and injuring the other two men. It was nine days after the signing of the Civil Rights Act.
An all-white male jury in Madison County acquitted Myers and Sims, despite an accomplice’s confession and corroborating statements from another klansman.
Thursday, retired Chief Superior Court Judge David Sweat said that some members of the jury were klansmen.
“It was just sort of a rigged deal,” Sweat said.
Tension was high throughout the South after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination in public places and made employment discrimination illegal.
In Athens, there were hundreds of confirmed KKK members, Sweat said.
“The Klan was just out of control,” he said. “There was no effort by law enforcement in the city of Athens. They acted with impunity.”
Credit: Ziyu Julian Zhu/AJC
Credit: Ziyu Julian Zhu/AJC
Bennie Roberson still remembers the fear that gripped the Black community after Penn’s killing.
His mother wouldn’t let him leave the house that summer day. He was in the 10th grade at the time but would go on to also join the Army.
The federal government eventually convicted Myers and Sims for violating the civil rights of Penn. They were sentenced to 10 years in prison. The case became the basis for the Supreme Court to expand protections to citizens, including the right to travel from state to state.
“That became a case that many legal experts think changed the landscape of prosecutions of civil rights cases in the South,” Sweat said.
In 2006, Chandler worked with a committee and the Georgia Historical Society to erect a marker near the bridge. It’s not enough, she said.
“I feel that many generations were scarred and wounded by racial hatred in the South,” she said. “I believe that you can only heal from those wounds by talking about them and owning them and thinking about how it made you who you are.”
